L – Will the Energiewende kill jobs?

Per megawatt-hour generated, renewables create more jobs than the fossil and nuclear sectors, and most of those jobs occur at home, not abroad. Germany already has twice as many people employed in the renewables sector than in all other energy sectors combined.

The transition to renewable energy is a job engine. An estimated 350,000 jobs had been created in the renewables sector in Germany by 2015, far more than the 182,000 people working in all of the country’s other energy sectors combined.

Simply put, renewables and efficiency replace oil and uranium imports with local added value, keep jobs in Germany, and have a net job creation effect.

These gures represent “gross job creation,” meaning the absolute number of jobs that have been added. A thorough study of the German market estimates a net job creation of around 80,000, rising to 100,000 – 150,000 in the period from 2020 to 2030. The “net” count means that jobs lost in other sectors (such as conventional energy) are subtracted from the total. One reason why renewables have such a tremendous positive impact on net job creation is that renewable power directly o sets power from nuclear plants, and very few people work in those sectors.

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Definitioner

Efficiency

Efficiency: the amount of useful energy output relative to the amount input. Not to be confused with the capacity factor.
For wind power and solar power, efficiency measures something fundamentally different than for non-renewable resources. For instance, an old coal plant may have an efficiency of 33 percent, meaning that a third of the energy in the coal is converted into electricity, with the other two thirds being lost as waste heat. Nonetheless, 33 percent may sound better than the 15 percent efficiency of an off-the-shelf solar panel.
But there is a difference: the coal is lost forever when consumed, so it makes sense to use it as efficiently as possible; in other words, we lose what we use. While it obviously also makes sense to use sunlight as efficiently as possible, with solar and wind we lose what we do not use – the Earth gets roughly the same amount of energy from the Sun every day. Whatever we do not harvest with wind turbines and solar panels is lost forever.
This distinction becomes clearer when we keep in mind that the volume of coal power is different depending on whether we count primary energy or useful energy, but the amount of wind and solar power is the same in terms of primary/useful energy.